Volume 16, Issue 3

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In the Winter issue, Ruth Johnson Carter, our luminous and insightful Editor-in-Chief for the last seven years, announced her retirement. As one of the Journal's Editorial Consultants, it has been my privilege to support her and the Journal during these significant years of development, and it is an honor now to serve as Guest Editor while we search for someone to fill the huge gap left by Ruth's departure.

Among the stimulating authors of articles and book reviews assembled for this issue are friends old and new. The remarkable lead article by Franz Renggli of Basel, Switzerland delves briefly but deeply into the life work of the Dutch scholar, Bruno Hugo Stricker. What Renggli provides is the first introduction in the English language of Stricker's surprising discovery of the prenatal and perinatal dimensions of ancient Egyptian mythology and culture. Out of the darkness of the burial chamber of Ramses VI, with its hieroglyphics, books, and pictorials, we are allowed to glimpse a culture that integrated embryology and cosmology, birth with death and soul.

Ludwig Janus of Heidelberg, Germany takes us on another journey of exploration into the hidden roots of cultural practices and thought forms in the universal elements of our primal experiences in the womb and at birth. Dr. Janus, President of the International Society of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine, presented this paper at the 10th Congress of APPPAH upon receiving the 2001 Thomas R. Verny Award for Outstanding Contributions to Pre- and Perinatal Psychology.

Illuminating the confusing, densely buried realms of the human brain, Allan Schore of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine charts the neurobiology of attachment and early personality organization-an intimidating territory only recently opened to exploration. Allan courageously explains the vast neurological complexities that underlie the simplest human experiences of loving attachment and early nurturing-and why they must not be taken for granted. He was a workshop presenter and panel speaker at the 2001 International Congress of APPPAH.

Inveterate trail blazer, and former Verny Award winner, Michel Odent, shares with us four essays in a field he helped to invent: primal health research. As Director of the Primal Health Research Centre in London, Dr. Odent created the quarterly Primal Health Research newsletter and the Primal Health Research Data Bank-precious instruments for exposing the invisible and overlooked connections between events in fetal life, perinatal experience, and early infancy and our health in later life. He has been writing quarterly essays on the subject for subscribers to his newsletter since 1993. I am happy to report that we have gained his permission to reprint, annually, four of these essays for extended circulation to the world-wide readers of this Journal. In this issue, we celebrate the beginning of this new collaboration.